8 Boss Battle Difficulty Spikes That DESTROYED Players

A game doesn’t have to be an all-out ball breaker to feature an insane difficulty spike and Alice: Madness Returns is a great example. Are there an infinite amount of other ways I could have phrased that thought? Sure. Am I going to change it? Absolutely not.

Much like me with that sentence we can and will only march onwards which coincidentally is one of the problems with the trickiest fight in Madness Returns, your final showdown with The Dollmaker. As everything comes to an absolutely horrifying head in one of the yuckiest ever video game encounters, in theme if not in grotesque character design, Alice: Madness Returns kicks you into the deep end and tells you to figure it out with a wild combination of every nasty enemy you’ve encountered in the game so far collected in a tiny arena with almost nowhere to hide, plus more fun wrinkles attached to two disembodied hands which would happily join Master Hand on a list of our least favourite floating hands. As for the only moving forward bit, when you die, which you will, because you’ll likely need to in order to work out the many boss stages, the game doesn’t throw you back in with your maximum health. 

“Why would you be able to take out the last boss with half your health if you couldn’t do it with all your health”, I hear you ask? Well if you watched me stream this one you would have heard me ask that question repeatedly and very loudly, though my version while riddled with expletives.

It doesn’t help that you really need to finesse the game’s already awkward targeting system in this fight as more often than not it’s counter-productive. Despite being generally not all that punishing and featuring a fairly smooth ramp up in challenge from start to finish, the final fight will test you not only your patience for its controls which are clearly rooting against you, but also the dozen different enemies and their attacks that you’ll need to consider at once.